JJ,
Comments below.
On Wed, 9 Dec 2009 23:02:40 -0800, JJKennedy03 <> wrote:
>I have 10 or so Dell Precision Workstations T3400s that I would like to upgrade the operating system and with that some hardware upgrades too.
>Current configurations
>Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz Processor
>4GB of RAM
>Quadro FX4600
>(2) 80GB SATA 10000rpm drives
>The 2 pieces that I would like to upgrade would be jumping the RAM up to a total of 16GB (1033 bus speed I believe) and replacing both hard drives with (2) 160GB S2 10K rpm drives.
Uprades are tricky, because it's easy to price yourself to a point where buying
a new machine is a better investment. Particularly with the i7 "Lynnfield" CPU
architecture that blows the old Core 2 Duos out of the water.
4GB is the minimum, but still acceptable amount for ACA + Windows 7 x64. When
you go to a 64-bit OS + application, your memory headroom goes through the roof,
so you don't get the same kind of out of resources issues as you will under
32-bit XP. Even without any RAM upgrade, moving to Windows 7 and ACA x64 can
solve a lot of issues.
Note that to go to 16GB requires (4) 4GB DDR2 chips, which isn't exactly cheap -
you would be at ~$550 per machine. The bang for the buck is pretty low once you
go past 8GB.
If your current RAM setup is a 2x2GB configuration, you could optimize your
upgrades by shuffling RAM around to give everyone 8GB, using 4x2GB chips for a
total of 8GB. You can get a set of 4x2GB chips for about $300.
The hard disks would only need upgrading if you are running out of space (80GB
is pretty small but viable for many CAD systems when all of your data in on a
server). You didn't say the RAID setup, but you could put the two together in a
very fast RAID 0 config for 160MB.
>I don't think I really need to upgrade the graphics card, I think the current one is fine and if I would have to, that would put me over budget, but I am thinking about upgrading the processor to 3.2 of which is the highest I can go without replacing the motherboard of which I don't also want to do.
The graphics card is fine. Beyond fine, actually.
At 2.3GHz, the Core 2 Duo CPU is quite on the slow side; a bump to over 3GHz
should be noticable to the end user, and should be worth the $200 upgrade cost.
It should be using 1333Mhz RAM, not 1033 MHz, I believe.
So, at a bare minimum, you are talking about $300 for RAM, $200 for the CPU, and
another $140 for Windows 7 professional 64-bit = $640 per machine to bring it up
to speed. But it's still only a dual-core, older CPU architecture. But still
much cheaper than buying new PCs.
>If anyone has experience with upgrading to 64 of which I know there is, I would definitely like to read input from you on your opinions regarding the move.
Have been running ACA x64, Revit 2010 x64 under Win7 x64 for some time now with
great success. Any other OS is, IMO, simply not an option.
Matt
matt@stachoni.com